Some businesses only use their blogs to let customers know about news and events regarding their company and products. And although this is fine, you can reap many more benefits from this platform.
If you use your blog right, it can help you establish authority in your industry, boost SEO, and even generate leads and sales.
According to statistics, 68.5% of consumers say that a blog adds credibility to a website. Additionally, 81% of U.S. online consumers say that blogs are a trusted source of information and advice.
If you don’t have a blog or you struggle with lead generation and sales from it, read the tips below to learn how to achieve success at it.
Write In-depth Articles
The internet is filled with blogs that don’t get any attention due to poorly-written content. Successful business blogging requires writing in-depth articles that your target audience will want to read. With these types of articles, you will be able to explore topics your competitors usually ignore.
In-depth content allows you to build trust between your leads and your company so you can form a strong relationship. This brings more sales and also helps you create a stronger brand image. When you offer something fresh and helpful to readers, you will notice an influx of sales in no time.
To achieve this, your content should have the following characteristics:
- Uniqueness. Most company blogs out there offer bland and uninteresting content, which doesn’t make them stand out at all. If you put in enough effort to make unique content and highlight the positive aspects of your company and products, your readers will always keep coming back for more.
- Usefulness. There is no point in writing a long-winded article that doesn’t have any useful information. If you write content that doesn’t solve any problems, you will just waste your readers’ and your own time. So always strive to write articles that give useful and problem-solving advice.
- Entertainment. Always write content in a way that entertains your readers, as people have a really short attention span. If you manage to entertain potential customers with your content, you will come across as someone they want to buy from.
Use Long-tail Keywords
All of your hard work that goes into writing blog posts will be for nothing if you don’t apply on-page SEO strategies. Search engine optimization is a challenge, but it will help you reach a high-ranking position on Google and other search engines.
Whether you decide to hire on-page SEO services or do it yourself is up to you, just know that in this day and age, where the competition is fierce, you need to capitalize on every aspect of your page. And the most efficient way to do this is by using long-tail keywords.
If you manage to integrate these keywords into your posts, you will be able to bring in relevant and organic traffic to your blog.
Most businesses use head keywords in their efforts to generate traffic. And while these words are searched frequently, they are too competitive. This means that if you use them, you will be fighting with a lot of competitors for a high-ranking position.
Long-tail keywords are more descriptive and aren’t used as often as head keywords. Larger companies often avoid using them, as they can be hard to integrate. But if you manage to incorporate long-tail keywords into your blog posts, you will also attract more leads due to their buyer-intent nature.
This means that your potential customers are actually searching for long-tail keywords more often than head keywords. You just need to know the type of keywords your leads might be searching for, and then include them in your articles.
Create Lead Magnets
Some leads need extra motivation to convert to customers. This is exactly what lead magnets are for.
A lead magnet is a freebie you can offer to website visitors in exchange for something, such as their contact information.
Lead magnets can be anything your customers find useful. Some of the most popular lead magnets include:
- reports
- checklists
- video training
- guides
- ebooks
- how-tos
If you’re wondering why you should be using freebies just to collect your lead’s contact information, you should know that lead magnets actually have a lot of benefits.
- Building trust. Potential customers need a reason to trust you and see that you aren’t just trying to take their money. This is exactly what you prove by offering free valuable information.
- Establishing authority. Lead magnets prove you know what you are doing and are confident enough to share that information. This shows you are an expert in your field.
- Growing your email list. Email lists are an essential part of any business. When you collect contact information through lead magnets, you will be able to attract your target audience and segment them into groups. Then you will be able to run an email marketing campaign more efficiently, nurturing those leads all the way to turning them into customers.
Mention Your Products
As we’ve already mentioned, the blog posts you write need to be unique, useful, and entertaining. And while this is extremely important, you should never forget why you are writing these articles in the first place.
The main purpose of your blog should be to generate more sales and to bring attention to your products. But that doesn’t mean that you should devote entire articles to those products. Instead, you should write blog posts that are relevant to your products, and then mention them.
But the most important thing to remember is not to be pushy, and also to limit the number of times you mention the product or service you are selling. If you go overboard, potential customers will see right through your content marketing “efforts”.
Your articles need to offer real value to your readers without being pushy. Also, they should allow potential customers to become familiar with your products or services organically. Hard-selling could easily backfire, so this type of subtle promotion will do wonders, but only if it’s not out of context.
Don’t forget CTAs
With every new blog post, you provide your readers with valuable and useful information. This helps build trust and establish authority, and that, in turn, helps generate more sales. But generating sales isn’t so easy, and there is one more thing you should include in your blog posts – CTAs.
A call to action, better known as a CTA is the last step in your content marketing. Everything you do until the reader reaches your CTA has built trust, promoted the product, and established your authority in very subtle ways. Now it’s time to give your leads the direction they need to go if they want to purchase what you’re promoting.
CTAs aren’t subtle at all. In fact, they should be clear and straightforward to show leads why they should act on the offer. If you don’t include a good CTA, your business blogging efforts will be in vain as you won’t be able to convince leads to take that final step that will convert them into customers.
The most important thing when it comes to CTAs is placement. The biggest mistake you can make is placing your CTA at the beginning or middle of your blog posts. Most leads won’t act on this type of CTA, as they haven’t read the entire post yet and learned why they should act on it.
Instead, include them at the very end of your blog posts after you’ve educated your audience on the importance and benefits of your product. Also make sure the CTA is large, meaningful, and hard to ignore.
Wrap-up
Content marketing is here to stay and it can definitely help you grow your business – but only if it’s done right. If you follow the above-mentioned tips, you will be able to bring in a lot of traffic to your website and convert website visitors into customers.
It could be a long process, and sometimes it might seem counterproductive to give away so much free content, but that’s just a part of online marketing. If you stick to it and write blog posts on a regular basis, it will all be worth it in the end.